Talks about how to deal with Syria have been going on and new ones begin soon:

January 22, 2104

U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said he will meet Syrian opposition and government delegations separately Thursday, a day ahead of their first negotiations when he will try to bring them together to discuss ending that country’s bloody civil war.

Brahimi, speaking to a news conference Wednesday after all-day ministerial talks in the Swiss city of Montreux, said he has “fairly clear indications” that the parties are ready to discuss prisoner swaps, humanitarian access and local cease-fires.

“We will try to see if we meet Friday morning separately and hopefully by Friday afternoon both sides will sit in one room,” he said later.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the two sides that “enough is enough,” imploring them to end a conflict he said had made Syria “a breeding ground for foreign extremists and terrorists.”

As far as the nightmare in Syria, in addition to 100,000 presumably killed during the conflict there in the past three years or so, on the news I saw recent images allegedly from Syria that reminded of the brutality by the Germans of the Jewish imprisonments, mistreatments, murders, and tortures known as the Holocaust (non-Jews were also affected).

Here is a report about what some associated with the Assad Regime have been involved in over the past couple of years:

January 22, 2014

Professor Sue Black from the University of Dundee studied thousands of pictures of bodies of young men who are believed to have been tortured by the Syrian regime.

She says the photographs released in the last few days were the most “distressing” she had ever seen.

Political leaders, including foreign secretary William Hague and US secretary of state John Kerry, have gathered in Switzerland for peace talks aimed at ending the three-year conflict…Damascus has denied allegations of abuses after the emergence of the gruesome images, apparently smuggled out by a defector from the regime and published in a report commissioned by Qatar, which supports Syrian rebel and opposition groups…

Assad’s mass killings are Syria’s ‘holocaust’

THE systematic torture and killing of 11,000 detainees in Syria has been compared to the holocaust by a Scottish scientist who co-authored a report claiming the Assad regime is guilty of war crimes…

The atrocities, reported on by Prof Black and five other experts in their fields, came to light as the result of the defection of a former Syrian military policeman, whose job had been to take photographs of the corpses of the torture victims.

The former military policeman – codenamed Caesar to protect his true identity – managed to smuggle out 55,000 pictures that he and others had taken of around 11,000 corpses.

Speaking to The Scotsman after returning from her trip to the Middle East where she spent two days examining the images, Prof Black described the pictures as “absolutely horrendous”, and likened the imagery of the starved remains with “going back in time and looking at concentration camps”.

She said: “It was most distressing. In this day and age, you really don’t expect to be able to witness these sort of things on this sort of scale. It is very sobering.”

While many claimed ‘never again’ would the world put up with the type of atrocities associated with the Holocaust and WWII, the reality is that something similar has happened in Syria this century and something worse will also be coming (cf. Matthew 24:21-22).

I have been praying for the victims of Syria’s civil war for some time, and what has happened makes me wish to pray more fervently for God’s Kingdom to come (cf. Matthew 6:10)–quickly (cf. Revelation 22:20).

While hopefully, some of the torture and killings will stop, even if that occurs, Syria will not end up well

More trouble is coming to Syria, and the Bible teaches that its capital Damascus will be destroyed (Isaiah 17:1). An Islamic confederation that will include the land of Syria is coming (Daniel 11:40-43; Ezekiel 30:1-8; Psalm 83:4-8) is coming.

Jesus taught, “And what I say to you, I say to all: Watch!” (Mark 13:37).